Do you know how I found out about GameTunnel’s relaunch? THROUGH PROJECT WONDERFUL. I was like, "Oh, look, I can run a new ad from… GameTunnel? Whoa." I should add that this redesign is aytch oh tee tee, HOT, all electric apple and slippery menus.

Also worth noting: indie developers can submit their games for review. Like, there’s an actual spot to do that, right in the navigation header. I love that.

"Technoculture critic and former Wired contributor Erik Davis is concerned about the proliferation of reviews, too. ‘Our culture is afflicted with knowingness,’ he says. ‘We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that’s great on many levels. But we’re forgetting the pleasures of not knowing. I’m no Luddite, but we’ve started replacing actual experience with someone else’s already digested knowledge.’"

Nicole Gustafsson’s Shy Guys, completed just in time for the SUPER iam8bit exhibit, which opens August 11 in Los Angeles. (It’s nice to see somebody exploring the softer side of “shy.”)

I am pretty sure I have mentioned this every summer for the last several summers, but my birthday is actually that very—oh, never mind. Twenty-three was the last birthday I celebrated, anyway. I know, I know.

So yesterday I decided it was time to get serious, grow some professionalism, and brand my Twitter page as if I were suddenly some sort of social media maverick. And wow, what a bad fit. I don’t think putting my email address on my Twitter page was the right decision for me at all. It’s just so douchey, right?

My friend Chris has said to me—and I think this might be true—that my tweets are all “snark and mortal peril.” Ugh, I hate when Chris is right. I generally tweet only when I’m annoyed, or if something has just almost hit me. I can’t brand that stuff! And I will need to be extra-careful with Google+, because there are only so many ways I can announce that I’m angry before everyone in my “circles” “mutes” me. We’ll see.

Nonetheless, while I was working on my Twitter background in Photoshop, I started thinking of the 1982 short film Arcade Attack, which is all about how Space Aliens are Invading the City and Murdering Pinball.

Inspired (sort of), I found a Manhattan skyline, complete with a Radiator Building—which looked more like a Chrysler Building until I sawed the top off—and then I grunged everything up using Eduardo Recife’s Photoshop brushes. The Invaders are just dingbats, anyway, so I basically did zero work.

My new Twitter background, as I discovered seconds after I uploaded it, makes for a terrible Twitter background. So I debranded it, rebranded it, and uploaded it as downloadable desktop wallpaper for you! I don’t know who on Earth would ever want Infinite Lives desktop wallpaper, so I’m sorry.

Here’s the good news! The image’s dimensions are 1920×1440, which is the size of nobody’s monitor, so if you clip the top of the image to fit your widescreen monitor, it’s debranded again like magic.

Late last year, Internet Guy Skruffy Nerfherder (yep) briefly sold a limited run of Pip-Boy 3000 kits, and I only just found out about them. So much for what would’ve been the best anniversary gift ever, huh.

Skruffy based the kits on his own resin sculpt, and—well, see for yourself, how amazing his Pip-Boy is:

My favorite part is the Pip-Boy’s “LCD,” which is just a little pane of plexiglass illuminated with LEDs. With the light diffused through a slip of paper, and with a green gel on top, the screen gets that authentically murky glow. (Don’t even get me started on the hinge.)

Via waxy.org: "Two thirds of people with accounts at both Sony and Gawker reused their passwords." More intriguing, though, is the catalogue of the 25 most common passwords. What do "maggie," "peanut," "princess," "sunshine," and "cookie" have in common, I wonder. My guess? They’re all the names or nicknames of precious children and/or pets.

I don’t know a whole lot about sewing and stuffing plush toys, but I’ll wager that it isn’t the easiest thing to manufacture an elongated egg out of fleece. Just a hunch. Anyway, deviantartist MelloReflections made this handsome stuffed Portal turret. He lights up when you hug him! (And he doesn’t blame you.)

Here’s a REAL LIVE VIDEO of J.C. Fletcher demonstrating Super Mario Land on the Nintendo 3DS. You can toggle the screen between Pea Soup View, Stark Black and White View, and "a little bit recessed." Very nice.

Adventure gamers, rejoice! After two abominable (and contemptibly crass) attempts to reanimate the franchise, Larry himself returns—and this time with creator Al Lowe!—in a remake of his original Epic Troll, Land of the Lounge Lizards.

Oh, great. Great. In August 2005 I predicted the Nintendo “Revolution” would feature a wireless touchscreen controller that might double as a portable, handheld game system—a little like the Dreamcast’s VMU, but 800x better. And what’d we end up with? Glorified television remotes, you guys.

At Tuesday’s E3 press conference, Nintendo confirmed persistent rumors: the Wii’s successor, the “Wii U,” intends to make waves with its touchscreen controller. Is this genius? Yes. Could Nintendo have released it six years ago, far predating the iPhone’s ubiquity? Yeah, no, OK, probably not.

I’m kind of a fanlady, sure, but this thing is exceptional. It’s as if its designers took a Wii Classic Controller—which, thanks to the slow perfection of several generations, is a perfectly calibrated configuration of buttons, dual analog sticks, and a directional gamepad—and yanked at both ends until there was room for an iPod Touch in the middle. Add a microphone, a camera, subtle stereo speakers, and God knows what else, and they’ve cooked up something formidably functional.

Can we talk about me again, though? Can we go back to my prescient, six-year-old doodle again? (My doodle is now old enough to draw its own doodles.) This inane, jokey mock-up was COMPLETE WITH TILT ACCELEROMETER ACTION, AND ALSO, A CLIP-ON STEERING WHEEL. Today, clip-on racing wheels actually exist! For Wii Remotes! My dream became a reality! But does anyone remember my prediction? Absolutely not. This E3 game = totes bogus.

P.S. I also anticipated a cooking game where players would make frying pan “flipping” gestures. No one cares. I know.

When you play games on your iPod Touch, do you find yourself, erm, all thumbs (so to speak)? The Fling mini is here to correct that!

The mini, based on the original Fling for iPad, is a pair of “analog” joysticks that suction onto a smartphone’s touchscreen, grafting a physical controller right atop the onscreen one. Smart! And since the joysticks provide “haptic feedback”—that’s leetspeak for “gamefeel”—you might discover that these joysticks offer just what your iPhone (or Android) hack-and-slashes have been missing.

And though the joysticks certainly take up a whole lot of touchscreen real estate, the designers promise that, once the stick itself is backlit, it becomes nigh transparent. (Its designers also promise that the joysticks are “compatible with hundreds of great games,” but by all appearances the Fling mini has, so far, been tested against just seven. Oh, well.)

The Fling mini doesn’t appear to be in production quite yet, but you can pre-order each pair for US$24.95. Ah, the high price of high design.

Video game horror—that is, really effective, interactive horror—comes in all forms. Maybe good horror stems from easy, visceral jump scares, or from the anxiety of a timer, steadily counting down to zero. Maybe it owes to the dread of a moody atmosphere—eerie music, a creepy setting. Perhaps real feelings of fear come from an impotent or nonexistent combat system.

The Famicom game Sweet Home is often acknowledged by hobbyist historians as one of the first examples of the survival horror genre, and it may well be. But those of you with longer gaming histories know the truth—you might remember that unsettling adventure into the depths of a mountain, stealing treasure that ought never have been disturbed, and trying to escape with your life. This is the tale of Mountain King.

E.F. Dreyer Inc. is credited as the copyright owner for all these iterations, with Robert Matson generally credited as the program’s creator. Another programmer, Ed Salvo, put together the 2600 version in a mind-boggling six weeks as a contractor through VSS. (“I had an 800 version of the game, which I was to emulate,” Salvo told Digital Press’s Scott Stilphen.)

The game’s objectives are rather complex; without an instruction manual, however, they are downright arcane. As a child, I only knew that I had to collect these diamonds lying around the silent mountain corridors, the sole sound being the “ding” as the explorer treads across clusters of those gleaming gems.

In Mountain King your explorer is armed with nothing but a flashlight which, when its beam is trained on the darkness ahead, can sometimes reveal a shadowy chest full of treasure. Traveling the bottom floor of the cavern puts you in the domain of the giant spider, which will encase you in webbing as it skitters past. If you mash the joystick back and forth you might escape, but should the spider return while you are still trapped, you will be sucked dry as a spider meal.

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